BART turns 40: Some history lessons

BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, turns 40-years-old on the unfortunate anniversary of 9/11. Some historical and financial tidbits:

— The original system was supposed to serve Marin and San Mateo Counties, along with San Francisco, Alameda, and Contra Costa Counties. According to Stephen Zwerling, San Mateo dropped out due to concern that neighboring Santa Clara County, which was not paying into the system, would take advantage of the San Mateo stops. County leaders also felt that the BART taxes would be too high and the benefits from the stations too insignificant. As a result of the loss of the San Mateo revenue base, rural Marin County had to drop out because the system no longer had the regional funds to serve that county across the Golden Gate.

BART won’t have Dick Nixon to ferry around anymore.

— The City of Berkeley did not want the trains running above the street due to noise and visual impacts (as anyone who’s tried to sleep near an above-ground BART line can attest). However, Berkeley had little legal leverage to demand an underground line from BART, so the city voters approved a 1966 bond to pay to underground it themselves. That’s why the Ashby, Downtown Berkeley, and North Berkeley stations are underground. By contrast, in places like Los Angeles today, small cities are able to force regional transit agencies to pay for local improvements, like Compton using a lawsuit to get an aerial station on the Blue Line and activists in Crenshaw using the California Public Utilities Commission process to slow down and raise the Expo Line to Culver City. But the Berkeley example seems more fair: if you want local improvements, pay for it yourself.

— As documented by Mel Webber in 1976, BART’s capital costs (i.e. the cost to build the system) were 150% more than its leaders had publicly expected by that year, the operating costs were 475% greater, while ridership was only 50% of what they hoped. Certainly ridership has grown since 1976, but so has the system and its costs.

Today BART is an institution in the Bay Area, with many people (including me) relying on it for travel to work, airports, shopping, and recreation. But despite the BART love, was it worth building? Could there have been more convenient and cheaper alternatives? And now that we have it, how can we improve the system?

If you ask the critics, many bus advocates think that BART and CalTrain have cannibalized bus service for lower-income, transit-dependents. Most transportation academics would have preferred a cheaper system of high-speed buses on separate rights-of-way. And smart growth advocates would like to see more station area development, which has been stymied in many BART neighborhoods by local activists who don’t want more people, traffic, and parking challenges.

I hope BART will address some of these criticisms over the next 40 years by taking three main steps. First, BART should increase service in the urban core (San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley) with more frequent trains to maximize ridership in these densely populated areas. Second, BART should decrease service to outlying areas that don’t need expensive heavy-rail trains for suburban commuters. Third, BART should force local governments to lift the development restrictions around the station areas or face reduced service.

BART will probably never make enough money to pay for itself, which is okay given its role as a social service for moving transit dependents and the environmental (and quality of life) benefits it can bring by moving people via electricity rather than oil. But these three changes would improve revenues, reduce costs, increase ridership, and help the Bay Area take better advantage of its now 40-year-old investment.

When BART got started, they payed poorly, and we all suffered for it. Their ‘designers’ had zero experience on trains. When it came time to ‘choose’ the rail gauge, one of the designers picked up a book with listings, and said, “well, we want a train with a ‘wide track’ (7″ wider then U.S. standard track), so it won’t get blown off the track by wind… and he chose a gauge that is only used in Eastern (not western) Germany, that was created to keep foreign trains from invading Germany and Russia! So when it comes time to get ‘parts’ or ‘trains’ no one in the U.S. is going to supply the necessary axles, parts etc. and they (must) be sourced in Europe.

They can NEVER connect to the existing train tracks that AMTRAK and the rest of American uses. They can never use cars or engines (millions) that use standard gauge.’Way to go!’

Elkind uses the term ‘transit dependents’ as though those of us who use communal and public transit are the bad guys. It’s the single-occupant personal car user who is the villain — our entire city planning and resource generation and consumption cycle is organized around cars, and it’s obvious to those of us who have broken our addiction to cars that if the true costs of car culture were borne by the drivers they would be much more motivated to make the transitions necessary to keep us all from being driven off the ecological and economic cliff.

Whose land is this? Judging by the rows and rows and rows and aisles and aisles and aisles of stationary and moving cars that are either empty or nearly empty, you’d have to conclude that people are the servants and cars the masters. How much of our blood and treasure do we have to keep sunk in car culture?